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Stuart Rojstaczer - The Mathematician's Shiva

Monday, September 15, 2014 - 7:00pm

Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish émigré mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully took the solution to her grave. To Sasha’s chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution—even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela’s notes.

Written by a trained geophysicist, The Mathematician's Shiva ($16.00) is a hilarious and multi-layered debut novel that brims with colorful characters and brilliantly captures humanity’s drive not just to survive, but to solve the impossible.

Stuart Rojstaczer was raised in Milwaukee and has degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and Stanford. For many years, he was a professor of geophysics at Duke University. He lives in Northern California.

WINNER OF THE 2014 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DEBUT FICTION For readers of "This Is Where I Leave You "and "Everything Is Illuminated, ""a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history and humor" (Jonathan Evison, author of "West of Here")